Lady of the Rivers Read online

  ‘I cannot advise my friend to come to you unless you, yourself, guarantee his safety,’ Richard says tightly. ‘Do you promise him your pardon for serving against you, Your Grace? Can I trust to your word of pardon?’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ the queen exclaims. ‘Who will join us?’

  ‘Andrew Trollope, and the six hundred trained and loyal men under his command,’ Richard announces, and steps aside to allow the slim hard-faced man into the royal presence. ‘And that,’ Richard says to me, as he comes to stand beside me, ‘has just decided the battle.’

  Richard is right. As soon as they know that Trollope has turned his coat and come over to us with his men, the three York lords disappear, like mist in the morning. They slip away, overnight, abandoning their men, abandoning their town, even abandoning Cecily Neville the Duchess of York, the wife of Richard the duke. When our army pours into the town of Ludlow, and starts to strip away everything they can carry, she is standing there, with the keys of the castle in her hand, waiting for the queen. She, who has always been a proud woman, married to a royal lord, is most terribly afraid, I can see it on her white face; and I, who had to wait in Mucklestone for their victorious army to sweep by, take no pleasure in seeing such a proud woman brought down so low.

  ‘You have the keys of the castle for me,’ the queen sings out, looking down on the duchess from high on her great horse.

  ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ Cecily says steadily. ‘And I plead for my own safety, and for the safety of these my children.’

  ‘Of course,’ the king says at once. ‘Sir Richard – take the keys and escort the duchess to a safe place, her children with her. She is under my protection.’

  ‘Hold a minute,’ Margaret says. ‘What children are these?’

  ‘This is my daughter Margaret,’ Duchess Cecily says. A tall girl of thirteen blushes painfully red and curtseys low to the queen, recovers from her mistake and curtseys again to the king. ‘This is my son George, and my youngest boy Richard.’

  I would judge George to be about eleven years of age and Richard about seven. They both look stunned with shock, as well they might; for they are boys who yesterday thought their father was heir to the throne of England, likely to fight his way through to the throne, and today find themselves facing the king’s army and their father run away. A crash from a house behind us and a piercing scream from a woman, begging for help as she is pulled down and raped, reminds ul that we are in the middle of a war, talking in a battlefield.

  ‘Take them away,’ the king says quickly.

  ‘And your husband has left you here?’ the queen torments the defeated duchess. ‘Do you remember how you insisted that you be admitted to my chamber when I had just given birth to my baby, and you told me that your husband must visit my husband when he was ill, in the time of our travail? He forced his way into the Privy Council once, but now we see he just ups and goes. He is present where he is not wanted; but when he is needed, he just abandons you. He declares war and then disappears from the battlefield!’

  The duchess sways on her feet, her face as white as skimmed milk. Smoke drifts across the market square, someone somewhere has fired a thatch. The woman who screamed for help is sobbing in rhythmic pain. I see the little boy Richard look around at the sound of someone smashing an axe into a locked door and the babble of an old voice praying to be spared, calling for mercy to someone who is not listening.

  ‘Your Grace,’ I say to the queen. ‘This is no place for any of us. Let us leave the lords to regain control of the men and get out of this town.’

  To my surprise she smiles at me, a gleam of malice that shows clearly before she drops her eyes to her horse’s mane and hides her expression. ‘It’s a very blunt weapon: an army of uncontrolled men,’ she says. ‘When York raised an army against me, he cannot have imagined that I would bring my army against him and that it would be like this. He has taught me a lesson that I have learned well. An army of poor men is a terror indeed. He nearly frightened me. He must be sorry now, now that there is an army of poor men tearing apart his home town.’

  The little dark-haired boy Richard flushes in temper, looks up, opens his mouth as if to shout his defiance. ‘Let’s go,’ I say swiftly, and my husband calls a couple of horses forwards, lifts the duchess into the saddle without ceremony, settles her children in the saddle before three cavalrymen, and we leave the town. As we clatter over the bridge I can hear another woman scream and the noise of running feet. Ludlow is paying the price for the flight of their lord, the Duke of York.

  ‘Yes, but not his death,’ my son Anthony observes. The three of us are riding home to Grafton together, our men straggling down the road behind us. I observe, but try to make it clear that I have not seen, that they are weighed down with loot; every one of them has some cloth bound tight in his pack, or a piece of plate, or a cup of pewter. They were our tenants but we put them in the queen’s army and they fought by her rules. They were told that they might loot Ludlow to punish the treasonous York lords and we will never muster them to ride out for us again if we spoil their sport and demand that they hand back the goods they have thieved. ‘While York lives, while Warwick lives, while Salisbury lives, the wars are not over; they are only put off for a little while longer.’

  Richard nods. ‘Warwick is back in Calais, Richard Duke of York back in Ireland. The kingdom’s greatest enemies have returned to refuge, safe in their castles overseas. We will have to prepare for an invasion again.’

  ‘The queen is confident,’ I say.

  The queen is tremendously confident. November comes and sill she does not return to London, hating London and blaming the London ballad-makers and chap-book sellers for her unpopularity in the kingdom. Their tales and songs describe her as a wolf, a she-wolf who commands a Fisher King – a man reduced to a shell of what he should be. The most bawdy rhymes say she cuckolded him with a bold duke and popped their bastard in the royal cradle. There is a drawing of a swan with the face of Edmund Beaufort, waddling towards the throne. There are songs and ale-house jokes about her. She hates London and the apprentices who laugh at her.

  Instead she orders the parliament to come to Coventry – as if parliaments can be ordered by a woman like outriders – and they obediently come as if they were her messengers, bound to do her bidding when she orders new oaths of loyalty to the king but also to her by name, and to the prince. Nobody has ever sworn loyalty to a queen before – but they do now. She cites the three York lords for treason, takes their lands and fortunes, and hands them out as if it were all the twelve days of Christmas come early. She orders the Duchess Cecily to attend so that she can hear her husband named as a traitor, and listen to the death sentence passed on him. Everything the York lords owned, every rood of land, every banner, every honour and title, every purse of gold, is stripped from them. The poor Duchess of York, now a royal pensioner and a pauper, goes to live with her sister, the queen’s loyal lady, Anne the Duchess of Buckingham, in something between house arrest and torment; a half-life for a woman who was once called ‘Proud Cis’ and now finds herself a married woman with a husband in exile, a mother missing her oldest son, Edward, the daughter of a great house who has lost all her lands and her inheritance.

  SANDWICH, KENT, AND CALAIS,

  WINTER 1460

  Richard is ill paid for warning the queen that the Warwick ownership of Calais has put an enemy on our shoreline, for as soon as the fighting is done and the peace won, she asks him

  to go to Sandwich and reinforce the town against attack.

  ‘I’ll come too,’ I say at once. ‘I can’t bear you to be in danger and me far away. I can’t bear for us to be parted again.’

  ‘I’m not going to be in danger,’ he lies to reassure me, and then, catching my sceptical expression, he giggles like a boy caught out in a blatant falsehood. ‘All right, Jacquetta, don’t look at me like that. But if there is any danger of an invasion from Calais you will have to go home to Grafton. I’ll take Anthony with me.’

&nbs